Obama, Mexico, and Americans

The following post comes from our friend, Ligarius, who will be contributing with some frequency in the future.
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Guanajuato, Mexico – Though my family doesn’t descend from Latin America, nor indeed from any country speaking one of the Latin-based ‘Romance’ languages, I’ve been traveling in Mexico for a couple weeks now, since the semester ended at the college where I teach.

In Mexico City, my guidebook (one of the ones for traveling on a budget) directed me to some hotels that looked both cheap and respectable, in a neighborhood west of the Zocaló, whose location I already knew, near a quasi-tourist ‘destination’ that I’d never heard of, “El Monumento a la Revolución.”

What should strike any American about this colossal monument, at least if she is thinking, are its overwhelming indigenous features. Though the structure was originally designed to be a mausoleum (the construction was halted because of the Revolution) the indigenous images now adorn a national memorial to Mexico’s liberation from Spain in 1821. In one sense, of course, it’s entirely natural for Mexico to memorialize its independence from Europe (from so many Conquistadores) with images that predate the arrival of the Spanish.

But for an American it’s striking – because it’s impossible to imagine a comparably important monument anywhere in the United States, let alone in Washington, one that so proudly displays indigenous images.

“But the histories of the two countries are fundamentally different!”–

They are indeed. Mexico’s greatest president, according to pretty much anyone’s account of the history of this country, will always remain Benito Juarez (1806-1872), himself an indígena. The thought of a Native American having been, in 2008, the greatest ever President of the United States, certainly strains the boundaries of the imagination, as well as those of actual political possibility.

But such boundaries began to burst this week when Barack Obama acquired the (presumptive) Democratic presidential nomination. As one of Obama’s campaign posters victoriously announces, and as should seem undeniable, his very candidacy represents a much-advanced form of something unthinkable when Bush was re-elected. It says: “Progress.”

In November of this year, Americans will hopefully precipitate an electoral verdict that would rival one of the most admirably progressive events in the history of Mexico. It can do so by electing the candidate who is already a representation of hope for many of America’s traditionally disenfranchised groups. This includes, for instance, not only African Americans, but also Native Americans and, crucially for the election, Mexican Americans.

Since I brought some old magazines with me on my trip – the kind that can pile up over the course of a year or two – this morning I read a “Harper’s Index,” from April 2007, that included the following couplet:

Total value of U.S. government contracts in 2000 that were handed out without competitive bidding: $91,000,000,000
Total last year: $170,000,000,000

Though it defies propriety to refer, in Spanish, to individuals as self-satisfied in their unilateral philistinism as President Bush and Vice President Cheney, still, in addition to their being manifest criminals abroad, they are also, right at home, Conquistadores capitalistas. De la gente.

In any case, later this week I’m heading to the southern state of Oaxaca, home to many of Mexico’s large population of indígenas, and the birthplace of Benito Juarez.